Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Over at the Zero Hedge blog, Tyler Durden quotes a comment
that was added to the Texas Outlook Manufacturing Survey, a report issued by
the Dallas Fed..

Durden says that these 42 words summarize what will happen
in the next 6 to 12 months. Thus, we should take them seriously:

President
Trump looks to do things that will be favorable for business, which would
improve employment and growth if successful. However, protesters are
all over the place, so I tend to think that will cause trouble for the country
and for business.

There you have it. But, what do you really have? You have an
interesting sidelight on the current political circus.

On the one hand the Republicans are in charge of everything.
Once they get the next Supreme Court justice confirmed they will control the
three branches of the federal government. They control most of the state
governments too.

This comports a risk. When you are in charge of everything, you
become responsible for whatever comes to pass. If the world comes to an end, if
the economy falls apart, if terrorists attack the homeland… there is no one
else to blame. If bad things happen, Trump and his Republican colleagues will
be hung out to dry.

And yet, if ISIS is defeated, if Mexico pays for the wall, if
the economy comes roaring back, if employment opportunities miraculously appear…
Trump will look like a conquering hero. The Democratic Party will be become
even more irrelevant than it is today..

Thus, Democrats have a vested interest in Trump’s failure. But,
they do not want to have their own fingerprints on the failure.

If protests disrupt business and the economy; if Senate
Democrats make it more difficult for Trump to govern… they will put themselves
in the line of fire. The Trump administration will blame the Democrats for
tanking the economy and for compromising national security.

It’s a gamble. It shows us that a violent overflow of
powerful emotion often boomerangs. Expressions of extreme emotion are generally
ill-advised—mostly because they make you look angrily histrionic, not
consequential. They make you look as though you are off on your own anger trip
and have nothing substantive to offer. They also make you look like you are
willing to deconstruct the nation in order to make enhance your own political
standing.

The Trump administration is barely ten days old and already America
seems to have lost the faculty of Reason. Emotion is running wild. Charges and
countercharges are flying through the airwaves. Protesters are out en masse.
News media are saturated with public drama. You would think that the end is
nigh, that the apocalypse is just around the corner.

Famed economic historian Niall Ferguson is trying to direct some
light into the darkness. Admittedly, it is a tall order, but someone had to do
it. By his reading, the Trump administration is enacting the Book of Genesis
while Trump’s opponents are trapped in the Book of Revelation.

Or else, as I myself have presciently opined, the politically correct see Donald Trump as the Antichrist. They believe that if they can destroy him we will see the Second Coming of Jesus and the Heavenly City will descend upon the earth, bring liberty and justice to all.

There, that explains it all. Competing narratives. Since neither corresponds to the facts and since neither is fact-driven, they will never find common ground. It would
be helpful, Ferguson opines, if people started thinking rationally, even
suspending disbelief until we now the outcomes of the Trump policies.

Apocalyptic thinkers are up in arms about Trump’s executive
orders. Yet, when Barack Obama was ruling by executive orders they did not see
an imminent autocracy. They saw a perfectly clear-headed thinker. When Obama
banned some immigration from seven countries, his supporters thought it was a
great idea. Chuck Schumer praised it. When Trump banned some immigration from
the same seven countries, his detractors took to the streets and the airports
to protest the end of America as they knew it.

Trump is running what looks like a reality show. He seems happy
to provoke his enemies. Rope-a-dope, anyone?

His detractors are looking completely unhinged. How many
times can you call someone Hitler? Eventually, they will run out of insults.
Not because they do not feel very deeply, but because deep feelings are seriously overrated and because they are rhetorically
challenged.

Ferguson describes the activities:

Each
day brings news of fresh executive orders, interviews, tweets. Each day the
media shoot back at Trump. To read some of the press coverage of Trump’s first
week, you would think the Apocalypse was imminent. Indeed, the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists last week moved its famous Dooomsday Clock forward to two and
a half minutes to midnight. Yet in issuing executive orders, Trump is merely
following the precedent set by the previous occupant of the White House. The
hysterical over-reaction of the media is fresh proof that Trump is a
self-publicist of prodigious instinctive talent.

What’s a rational thinker to do? Perhaps, Ferguson says, one
can start by ignoring what Trump
says and watching what he does. The important point is what the executive
orders produce. We should judge policy by its outcomes, not by the hue and cry in the
media.

In Ferguson’s words:

I have
to confess I enjoy the entertainment for no other reason than that it drives
the most tedious people in America to distraction. But the real point is not
what Trump says. It is what his administration does.

On that score, no one really knows what the flurry of
executive orders, designed primarily to de-Obamify the government, will
produce.

Ferguson lists the orders and explains that each may produce
one or another outcome:

It may
be that the net result of the Republican corporate tax reform will be
economically disruptive, increasing the deficit and inflation. On the other
hand, it may be that the repatriation of corporate capital will generate more
revenue than anyone expects.

And also:

It may
be that all the regulations introduced since the 1980s are all that stands
between us and environmental and financial disaster. On the other hand, it may
be that most of this regulation was merely a bureaucratic scam and a leaden
weight on small and medium-sized businesses.

And also:

It may
be that a trade war will break out between the United States and China, one
that will hurt us almost as much as them. On the other hand, it may be that the
Chinese will end up rolling over in the face of Trump’s aggressive negotiating
tactics because their economic and political position is much weaker than most
people appreciate.

He continues:

And it
may be that challenging the globalized economic order is a fool’s errand that
will end up hurting everybody, including ordinary Americans, by raising
consumer prices. On the other hand, it may be that globalization had overshot,
and it was high time we dialed back the volume of migration, off-shoring of
jobs and cross-border investment.

The short conclusion is that we do not yet know what all of
these executive actions will produce. For that we will need to show some
patience and wait.

Ferguson is saying that the administration is neither
Genesis nor Revelation. True enough, an inexperienced executive has been making
serious mistakes, especially with his roll out of some executive orders.

But it is also true that we should do better than to make
our political life into public drama. Especially when that drama accomplishes
little more than allowing the protesters to let off steam.

In Ferguson’s words:

The
real question is: Can his administration — using the usual cumbersome channels
— enact and implement reforms that will fundamentally improve the lives of
ordinary Americans?

The
answer to that question will not be found in Trump’s Book of Genesis. But I
doubt very much it is in the liberals’ Book of Revelation either.

Monday, January 30, 2017

Equality is a mirage. Equal distribution of males and females
in business and the professions is an illusion.

Some people believe that there should be an equal number of
men and women in all businesses and professions. They also believe that there
should be an equal number of male and female mothers, fathers and homemakers.

Unless the day arrives when government bureaucrats choose
your career for you, it will never happen. We and not only we have often noted
that when too many females enter a profession, men flee it and the profession
becomes a pink ghetto. In time it has a large majority of women.

Take the therapy profession. In Great Britain today the
profession is 15% male and 85% female. Roughly the same percentages pertain to
psychology majors, so the therapy world is destined to become a more maternal space
where patients can get a female perspective on the world and on human
experience. Call it girl power, if you must, but it alienates men and makes the
clientele overwhelmingly female. Link here.

The result: women patients go to female therapists and
talk about their feelings. Potential male patients avoid the process
altogether. It sounds markedly sexist. Besides, why should it be that in
a time when women are increasingly involved in the marketplace they are being enticed to retreat into their minds? Why shouldn’t they learn how to deal
with real world problems? Could it be that female therapists do not know anything about real world problems, and thus
are consigning their female patients to a special kind of dysfunctionality?

By now, everyone knows about the gender disparity in the
therapy world. Men in particular are no longer going to therapy. They understand that women want them to get in touch with their
feelings, thus to get in touch with their feminine sides. They have no interest
in the enterprise. They know that a man
who is in touch with his feminine side is going to be less attractive to women.
He will be less able to compete in the marketplace, in the world where male
status is determined.

Men also understand that many male therapists have drunk the
same Kool-Aid and have bought into the feminization project that has come to
infect therapy.

The consequences are dire. In Great Britain men are three
times more likely than women to commit suicide and are far less likely to seek
help in therapy. There suicide is the leading cause of death for men under the
age of 45.

Dr. John Barry of the University College London explains:

Men are
three times more likely to kill themselves, yet women are 50% more likely to
seek professional help before taking their own lives. We know that 75% of women
sought help before they committed suicide, versus only half of men.

“So we
looked at the barriers to men getting help and found that some 16.5% of
men wanted to see a male therapist. That means more men might get help if they
were more able to talk to a man.”

It does not correlate with the gender neutered ideology that
infests so many postmodern minds, but a male patient will bond with a man in
ways that he will not bond with a woman. And a female therapist might very well
disparage male bonding methods.

Barry explains the difference:

In
therapy, men often talk about football, or jokey banter, which female
therapists can interpret as men not taking therapy seriously. But male
therapists know this is part of the trust-building process. Listen and talk to
them as men, and it can make a huge difference.

Part of the question then becomes, how many female
therapists respect men as men? To be gender neutral, how many male therapists
respect men as men? How many therapists believe that masculinity is an illness
that needs to be cured?

After all, female therapists are not merely female
therapists. They are likely to be feminists too. A profession that is supposedly grounded in science seems increasingly to be driven by ideology. Many feminists,
especially today’s more politically correct variety, believe that men, by
virtue of being men, suffer from an illness and need to be cured. Can you blame
any man from not wanting to place his mind in the care of ideologues
masquerading as professionals.

Given that therapy has been closed to them, how do men cope
with emotional distress. Barry tells us:

When
men are depressed we sleep less, become irritable, abuse drink and drugs, play
video games, use sex or pornography more, become aggressive, fight.

People
don’t sympathise with men who are depressed because, frankly, often men act
like idiots. So when we hear that men commit suicide at three times the rate
that women do, you might be forgiven for thinking ‘so what – that’s three times
fewer idiots on the planet'

Obviously, there’s more to it than self-destruction. Men
tend to self-medicate—if you will—with alcohol, sports and pornography. But, they might
also vent their frustrations and their anger by aggressive behavior… and not
merely against men.

Evidently, the rollout of Friday’s Trump administration
immigration order left a great deal to be desired. The Wall Street Journal
summarized the problems:

President Trump seems
determined to conduct a shock and awe campaign to fulfill his campaign promises
as quickly as possible, while dealing with the consequences later. This may
work for a pipeline approval, but the bonfire over his executive order on
refugees shows that government by deliberate disruption can blow up in damaging
ways.

Legions of Trump-haters have taken to the nation’s airports
to welcome Muslim refugees to America. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
has opened his arms to the refugees. To be fair, this was before a refugee shot up a mosque in Quebec City yesterday… but we would not want to allow that
to prevent us from asserting our values.

Back in the day it was commonly understood that German
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open arms policy had caused a major social calamity,
to say nothing of a crime wave. Through our idealistic lenses we see the
refugees as displaced peoples seeking refuge.

In all likelihood they see themselves as the first wave of
an invading army. The vast majority of them have no interest in assimilating.
They have no real interest in working. They want the West to submit to their
god. It’s their religion, after all. Ignore it at your peril.

Not all cultures are the same. Not all cultures are created
equal. Refugees in Sweden have turned that country into the rape capital of the
Western world. If that is what you want, embrace it. But, don’t accuse those
who want to avoid it with a lack of virtue.

For those with a short memory, I quote a Wikileaks document
produced for John Podesta—yes, that John Podesta—by a man living in the
Netherlands, a man who calls himself Orca. I have previously posted about this.
Here is an excerpt, by Orca:

Muslim Immigration and Multicultural Madness
have left a trail of misery and mayhem across Germany - with far worse to come
because of demographics ·

Muslims make up only 9% of Berlin's population,
yet account for 70% of young repeat criminals, revealed Berlin public
prosecutor Roman Reusch http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-51448987.html. To
be more precise, 46% of Berlin's juvenile serial criminals are of Arab descent,
while 33% of them have Turkish ancestry http://www.bz-berlin.de/archiv/jugendkriminalitaet-article961342.html.

In an un-German display of harsh-truth telling,
Reusch said in Der Spiegel that "in parts [of Berlin], the population
consist almost exclusively of problem cases." As he tells it, immigrant
children as young as six or seven years old turn to crime and grow up to see
honest hard-working people as targets - walking sources of easy money. German
society is completely powerless in the face of growing ruthless violence and
crime. To describe the German police and criminal-justice system as a big joke
would be unfair to big jokes. You won't be surprised to hear that the outspoken
public prosecutor has meanwhile been sacked from his job and banned from
talking to the media.

The German police admits that large immigrant
areas of Berlin, Hamburg, the Ruhr Area, etc. have become police no-go areas, where
criminals and extremists have free reign. Within no time at all, a lone police
patrol car making a foray into Germany's ethnic war zones finds itself
surrounded by a baying lynch mob, much like US soldiers in Baghdad at the
height of the troubles, added Roman Reusch.

You can
be a virtue-signaling moral narcissist and get all exercised about Donald
Trump's executive order suspending visas from seven primarily Muslim countries
for the next ninety days, but I have a question for you: what do we do about Islam?

The president of Egypt is alarmed by the current state of
Islam. He has called for a Reformation. Simon wrote:

… at
least one interested party -- the current president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi -- has declared bluntly that his religion is in dire need of a
reformation. Chances are he knows more about Islam than you. He certainly does
than me. Also, he lives in a hellacious region of the world dominated by
that religion and its violent ideology.

As for the statistics, Simon kindly provided them:

Why is
it that since 9/11/2001 there he have been 30,209 terror attacks
in the name of Allah? There have been 38 in the last six days alone, resulting
in 425 killed and 419 injured. There were also nine suicide
bombings during that time frame.

After all, this comes after a Woman’s March that was led by
an Islamist who does not have warm and fuzzy feelings toward people who
disagree with her.

In Simon’s words:

No,
ladies and gentleman, pretend though it's otherwise, we do have an Islam
problem, all of us. Europe as we knew it growing up is practically
gone and our society has been badly infected. When a massive march of
American women is led by a Muslim
woman who insists she wants to "take the vagina away" of one
of the great freedom fighters of our time, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who herself
has suffered from genital mutilation, we know things have come to a drastic
pass.

[Correction: First reports declared that there were two shooters in the Quebec City attack on a mosque. One of them was a Muslim. Later reports said that there was only one shooter, a white nationalist bigot. I stand corrected.]

Sunday, January 29, 2017

If you are reading the press you have the impression
that the American people are rising up en masse to protest Donald Trump’s
recent order restricting immigration from certain Muslim countries.

About which, Katie Hopkins offers some sobering words in The
Daily Mail. I quote them without commentary:

Have
you noticed? There has been more outrage from the left over Trump’s so-called
Muslim ban, than over terror itself.

More
gnashing of gums and loud wailing, more placards decrying the plight of a few
tourists and travellers, than over the bodies blown apart by Islamic extremists
at Brussels airport in March last year.

So much
collective outrage, in fact, I wonder how on earth a ban imposed by 16
countries on Israeli citizens has remained in place for quite so long with such
quiet acceptance….

What has led us to this latest executive order is not only Islamic extremists
knifing, shooting, stabbing and exploding peaceful citizens in the West, but
also the abject failure of the wider Muslim community to denounce these vile
acts.

It is
troubling to many that after each terrorist act there is largely silence from
the families and communities that raised the terrorists and from the mosques
that they frequented. Imams seldom condemn terror. And in their silence, in the
void, acceptance, encouragement even, is assumed.

If you want to know what I really, really feel, I feel sorry
for letter writer: Wanting to Feel Worthy. In a letter she wrote to New York
Magazine’s advice column, Ask Polly, she shared her whiny self-torment.

In the most pertinent sense, her letter answers her question.
Given how self-absorbed she is, it is no surprise that her relationships are so
faulty and that men are not lining up to invite her on dates. In truth, they
are running the other way.

I feel especially sorry for WFW because, after all, her
letter contains a veiled reproach. If she is—perish the thought—a regular
reader of Ask Polly, she has undoubtedly heard the drumbeat: Get thee to a
therapist.

Polly is a living breathing marketing campaign for therapy,
perhaps because it got her a gig at New York Magazine. Yet, she cannot offer any
cogent advice, so we should consider her a casualty of therapy. As I said, for
real advice, hie thee to Miss Manners. Or to the New York Times's, The Ethicist and Social Qs.

For Polly’s sake I hope she learns from letter writers like
this one and stops seducing gullible young people into getting involved in a
process that is obviously not helping.

What else can you conclude by reading the plaintive wails of
WFW:

I’m
writing you from a far-off land known as a personal journey. I started going to
therapy about a year and a half ago as a way to really work on myself, and for
the most part it’s helping. I am definitely more self-aware of my emotions and
I’m coming to understand a lot about who I am.

Lo and behold, WFW has gotten in touch with her feelings. She
thinks it has been helping her, because what else can she say. She has blindly
followed Polly’s advice and cannot admit openly that it has produced a
calamity. All that supposed self-awareness is worth precisely nothing.

She seems to understand that getting in touch with one’s
feelings makes one markedly self-absorbed and self-involved. She skips
effortlessly from real world events to her feelings. She never asks how she
comes across to other people. Do they see her as a self-absorbed narcissist or
as a loving and caring friend?

WFW continues:

I’ve
always operated from a place of self-loathing. Sometimes it’s dull, just
simmering there waiting to come out at a party or during a work meeting. Other
times, like when a guy cancels a date or ghosts me, it bubbles over like lava
and consumes every part of me. I sob because I feel so unlovable or
incompetent. I tell myself that it makes sense that I didn’t get that promotion
or that third date — because why on earth would I get it over someone else?

She sobs. Note the mid-Victorian vocabulary. Who today still
sobs?

Apparently, WFW lacks self-confidence and self-respect. This
should not surprise us. Her Polly-recommended therapist has rendered her
dysfunctional. Her therapist has taught her to retreat from the world into her
mind. The therapist has also taught her to be depressed. Clearly, this
therapist has no idea of how to deal with depression. Why would she? She is
hard at work producing it.

WFW writes:

When
will I actually start feeling worthy
of love and validation from men, from my career, from my friends, and, most
importantly, from myself? I know that I am worthy of it — I just don’t believe it. I don’t feel it.
It doesn’t sit with me comfortably. And it’s starting to feel like this journey
I’ve embarked on is more of a failed mission.

Thank God, here she is correct. It is a failed mission. She
ought to get out of her mind and into her life. Still, she has no sense of how
her behavior affects her career or romantic prospects. She is off on a
spiritual journey, one that, if I may, used to be the province of medieval
mystics. The difference is that when the mystics got into their mind, they were
seeking God, not self-absorption.

What does Polly offer a woman who mistakenly took Polly’s
advice? She tells her to feel her feelings. Wow! It takes your breath away.

Think about it this way. This is being called a paramedical
treatment. Our insurance companies are paying for it. Our representatives are
voting for more of it. Why are they paying for something that does not improve
anyone’s life?

Polly also notes that the woman has learned through therapy
to blame herself for everything that happens to her. She is wallowing in guilt.
She does not care about how she looks to others. Thus, she does not care about
her behavior. I have warned about this on numerous occasions for many years, so
I do not feel personally derelict.

Anyway, Polly says this:

In
order to feel worthy, you have to feel, period. Feel what you feel first,
without interpretation. Right now, your interpretations are taking over the
whole picture. For example: (1) A guy ghosts you. (2) You
feel disappointed. (3) You think, This proves that I am unlovable and incompetent. (4) You
sob and feel terrible over how unlovable and incompetent you are. Whenever you
feel sad or disappointed or angry, your brain steps in and tells you that it’s
your fault. Emotions are bad. Emotions mean that you’re messing up.

If you are going to feel your feelings, why shouldn’t you
feel the bad ones with the good ones? What does it mean to feel your feelings
if you only do so selectively. This point notwithstanding, Polly is showing us
the way many therapy patients learn to feel and to think.

As you know, Polly will eventually get into personal
confession mode and regale us with her own experiences. Thereby, she will be
showing that she does not care about WFW unless she can see the problem as a
function of her own therapy. Before that, allow her to offer some insights.

Polly writes:

You
feel bad, you hate yourself for feeling bad, and you tell yourself that you’re
destined to feel bad forever because you’re unworthy and weak and doomed to be
rejected over and over again. Likewise with your friends: You need to step out
of the way and let them enjoy their time together. You’ll only make things bad
for them. Instead of thinking, Jesus, I’m valued enough that these two
people want to spend time with me, you think, They’re just doing me a favor because I’m a
loser. They should just cut me out. That’s the only rational thing to do, since
I’m unlovable.

When
you’re inventing such extreme interpretations, when you give yourself shit just
for existing, when you tell yourself that you’re a blight on the face of the
earth and everyone would be better off without you, it’s natural that you’d
grow to hate your feelings. Eventually, it’s not just the feelings you have to
fear, it’s the miserable interpretation and the self-hatred that accompany
them.

It’s not just that WFW is feeling her feelings. She is doing
what therapy taught her to do. She is
getting in touch with all of her feelings, good and bad. As long as WFW is lost
in her mind, off on her own journey of supposed self-discovery she will be prey
to her feelings, or to what she takes to be her feelings.

As often happens in these columns, we know next to nothing
about the letter writer. We do not know how she functions in the world or how she
relates to other people. We know how she feels and we know how she interprets
those feelings, but we do not know what provoked those feelings. We do not know
what those feelings are telling her about her about the way she behaves toward
other people.

Without knowing any of those things, we really know nothing.
That is, we only know that her therapist is not helping her. And that Polly, offering
a spoonful of drool about feeling her feelings is not very much better.

Polly writes as though she is addressing a child:

Feelings
are scary, but if you stay vulnerable to them, if you refuse to apply the same
old nonsensical stories to them (I
feel feelings, therefore I am unlovable, therefore no one wants me around),
if you reject those stories outright (which includes rejecting people who tell
you those stories), if you tell new, powerful, brilliant, exciting stories
about what it means to feel and what you can build from feelings, then … well,
then you get to be a formidable motherfucking junk robot who roams the earth,
busting heads and singing loud robot songs and kicking bitchy junkyard robot
ass in general.

Surely, becoming a junkyard robot will improve your
relationships. It humanizes you. Everyone wants to be friends with a junkyard
robot. Everyone wants to date one too. What's wrong with being a junkyard dog?

Also, Polly recommends a class in storytelling. Now, today’s
quiz question: Who was it who said that therapy is overpriced storytelling? You
guessed it: I did.

As long as WFW is not in the game, as long as she does not
have real relationships with real people, as long as she is lost in her mind,
storytelling will only alienate her further. It will make her relationships
into material and will cause her to ignore what works in reality in favor of
what works in a fictional narrative.

Don’t these people know that the truth value of a fiction
does not depend on any reference to reality? It doesn’t depend on whether the
conclusions you draw are useful or useless. Stories have their own internal
logic and coherence. They have their own consistency, a consistency that has
nothing to do with your life. They will alienate you from your friends, get you
lost in your mind and turn you into a junkyard robot?

Or so it would appear. Now, we read in the Guardian, hardly
a shill for the alt-right—that the Great Britain’s National Health Service will
be rationing hip and knee replacements. People will be screened according to their level of pain.

A
senior NHS official
has admitted that funding shortages mean hip and knee replacements will have to
be rationed according to pain levels in some parts of the country.

Three
clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in the West Midlands have proposed
reducing the number of people who qualify for hip replacements by 12%, and knee
replacements by 19%. To qualify under the proposed rules, patients would need
to have such severe levels of pain that they could not sleep or carry out daily
tasks.

Julie
Wood, the chief executive of the NHS Clinical Commissioners, said the proposal
was a response to financial pressures.

“Clearly
the NHS doesn’t have unlimited resources,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today
programe. “And it has to ensure that patients get the best possible care
against a backdrop of spiralling demand and increasing financial pressures.”

This raises a larger, and perhaps pertinent question. How do
you compare his pain with hers? How do you know who is in the most pain? Don’t
we know that some people have more tolerance for pain and that some people have
less? Some people tough it out. Some people cannot. Some people have learned mental maneuvers to
diminish pain. Some people might even do the opposite.

If one criterion is whether or not pain causes you to lose
sleep, how do you distinguish between those who cannot sleep through the pain
and those who are chronic insomniacs?

The brief point is this: the NHS, the crowning glory of
Britain’s foray into socialism, is going to ration medical care on partially
subjective grounds. Admittedly, some politicians claim that they can feel your
pain. They cannot. They are lying to you. Otherwise they might have be able to find a job working for the NHS.

Stop the funds and you stop the terror. It feels like a quaint idea, so easy to
understand that many people believe that it cannot possibly be
true.

Barack Obama did not believe it. Not only did he
provide major cash infusions to Iran, the leading state sponsor of terrorism,
but he tried on his last day to support Palestinian terrorism by funneling
money to the Palestinian Authority. One notes that those who are up in arms
about the Trump executive order on immigration did not utter a peep about the
Obama administration’s funding of terrorism. For that matter they said nothing
when the Bush administration did the same.

In the
twilight hours of the Obama administration, Secretary of State John Kerry authorized
the transfer of $221 million to the Palestinian Authority—in violation of an
informal agreement with Congress not to do so. Fortunately, President Trump stopped
the transfer before the money left America’s shores. Now he has the
opportunity—and the responsibility—to do more.

Why has the American government been funding the Palestinian
Authority, allied as it is with Hamas? Aufhauser and Gerber explain:

Over
the past 10 years, Washington has provided more than $4 billion in foreign aid
to the Palestinian Authority. The goal has been to promote a government in the
Palestinian territories capable of assuming the responsibilities of a sovereign
state, including the recognition of the state of Israel as a legitimate member
of the community of nations. The aid has focused principally on security and
criminal-justice programs, U.S. Agency for International Development sponsored
assistance for schools, health clinics, water and economic development, and
generalized support for the Palestinian Authority’s budget. But unlike the many
nongovernmental organizations that contribute charitable funds to the region,
American assistance programs, while obliged to vet how the money is spent, have
yet to ensure effectively that taxpayer dollars are not diverted to support
acts of terror.

It’s the old “money is fungible” idea. The PA has been
making terrorism a lucrative business opportunity. It has been providing
generous cash payments to the families of anyone who goes out and kills some
Jews or some Americans. It’s the Palestinian way of supporting your family:
like winning the lottery.

I have on several occasions recommended that the American
government stop payments to the Palestinian Authority. As it happens, Saudi
Arabia and the Emirates are cutting down their support.

Aufhauser and Gerber agree:

In the
face of this widely advertised bureaucracy of terror, the Trump administration
should suspend all further aid to the Palestinian Authority. Not another dollar
should flow until measures are adopted to assure that no more people are slain
because American aid enabled the Palestinian Authority to confidently promise
compensation for killing. Congress has already introduced the vehicle to do
this, a bill in the name of Taylor Force. If passed into law, it would
condition aid on the secretary of state’s certification that the Palestinian
Authority has ended its legal sanction of terrorist financing. Without such a
commitment, and strong due diligence by the State Department to ensure that it
is honored, American funding of the Palestinian Authority should cease.

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Perhaps she was looking for attention. Married to famed
novelist Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman went out looking for the glare of the
spotlight. What could be more titillating, she must have told herself, than to
proclaim herself the archetypical Bad Mother?

Writing in The Daily Mail several years ago, Waldman laid
out the case for bad mothering. It lacked intellectual coherence but it grabbed
your attention:

Firstly,
that - unique to our generation - we are gripped by the terror that we're not
Good Mothers.

Secondly,
it struck me that so-called Good Mothers can be downright bad for their
children. Over-anxious and over-ambitious for their offspring, they risk making
them feel like failures.

Good
Mothers don't just want the best for their children: in their minds, if their
sons and daughters are not super-brains with armfuls of certificates, then what
have all their maternal sacrifices been for?

The
third horrifying truth is that, far from supporting each other, we mothers are
always trying to find fault with each other.

We
openly police each other - desperate to find a mother who's not as good as us,
so we won't feel so bad.

One is tempted to reply: Speak for yourself, Ayelet. Or
better, speak for your comrades in Berkeley, CA. The truth is that most mothers
are conscientious and caring. They take their job—if you must call it that—very
seriously indeed. I cannot imagine why she takes it on herself to demean and
defame mothers. Just to make herself feel better. Hers is an ignoble enterprise.

Strangely—and this is why her story is interesting-- Waldman
blames it on feminism. Who knew? She explains that her feminist mother brought
her up to believe that she could have it all. This was before Anne-Marie
Slaughter famously proclaimed that women could not have it all. Feminists hated
Slaughter because they believed that setting up an unrealistic goal was bad for
feminism. They did not mention that Slaughter did not invent this all herself.
It had been injected into the culture a long time before.

So, let’s be clear. Waldman is talking about women who were
brought up by a certain kind of feminist mother. To generalize from this to all American mothers or to all feminist mothers strikes me as one leap too many.

Anyway, she described her mother’s teaching:

Soon
after I was born, in 1964, my mother discovered feminism. As a child, one of my
earliest memories is of sitting on the stairs and listening open-mouthed as she
and her friends - including my schoolteacher - bitched about men in their
'consciousness-raising group'.

Deprived
of a career herself because she was at home with the children, my mother raised
me to believe that I would be able to work full-time as well as being a mother.

After
all those marches and all that bra-burning, my mother and her generation were
convinced they had sorted everything out for their daughters. We would have it
easy. Our male bosses, all raised by feminist mothers, too, would surely be
supportive and sympathetic to working mothers.

Of course, it was all a lie. And it was a lie even when women
like Waldman had husbands who worked at home and shouldered many of the
childrearing responsibilities.

So, Waldman returned to work after giving birth to her first
child and discovered—to her dismay-- that she wanted to be home with her baby. Were
it not for the power of indoctrination no one would have found this surprising.
Thanks to indoctrination women have been shocked to discover that they have a
maternal instinct. And that they are not entirely comfortable leaving neonates
to the tender mercies of human beings who lack said instinct. Having denied the
reality of their own biology—to say nothing of their moral responsibility—
daughters of feminist mothers were dismayed to discover that they had been lied
to. And not by the patriarchy.

What happened then? Glad you asked. Waldman quit her job and
became a stay-at-home mother. She hated it:

I felt
I'd betrayed my mother, feminism and myself. My mother's generation had
sacrificed so much to give me opportunities they never had, and I'd thrown them
back in their faces. My mother made no secret of the fact that she couldn't
understand my decision. She still can't.

But,
most unexpected of all, I found being a full-time mother hideously boring. And
I realised that one of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel
nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children
and falling far short of some indefinable ideal.

A Good
Mother is never bored, is she? She is never miserable. A Good Mother doesn't
resent looking up from her novel to examine a child's drawing.

Did she hate it because motherhood is such a bad deal for
women? Or did she hate it because she felt that she had betrayed feminism? These
are not the same. I will opt for the latter. You may draw your own conclusions.

As it happened Waldman had also written in the New York Times in 2005 that even if she did not much like being a mother, she was still
madly in love with her husband. And, by the by, they still had great sex. In
fact, her husband could not get enough sex. Precisely why we needed to know
this, I cannot imagine. So, we witness an independent liberated woman writing
her own manifesto, explaining that her husband is her life. That does not sound very liberated to me, but,
what do I know?

She wrote:

But my
imagination simply fails me when I try to picture a future beyond my husband’s
death. Of course, I would have to live. I have four children, a mortgage, work
to do. But I can imagine no joy without my husband.

Do you want to draw a conclusion about the state of her
marriage? Of course, you do not. It would not be polite. I would merely note
that Waldman seems to be suggesting that a woman who makes her children the
center of her universe will be neglecting her husband and will end up not
getting any sex. Whether this applies to her Berkeley friends at Gymboree or to
all women, I would not venture to guess.

Waldman insisted that she loved her husband more than her
children and that this made her a bad mother. Only a warped mind could draw
such a conclusion. Must we note that these are not the same kind of love.
Different loves apply to different relationships. One senses an absurd
confusion, engendered by an ideology.

Interesting point, Waldman’s husband is a perfect
househusband. He is a very successful writer but he also shares in all the
chores. If you are collecting royalty checks you have the liberty to do the
laundry and to change the diapers. One notes that her husband has admitted publicly to
having fallen love with men and to having had sex with a man, but one imagines that that is not a salient
detail.

Anyway, Waldman is anguished because sometime she does not
feel in the mood:

Can my
bad motherhood be my husband's fault? Perhaps he just inspires more complete
adoration than other husbands. He cooks, cleans, cares for the children at
least 50 percent of the time.

If the
most erotic form of foreplay to a mother of a small child is, as I've heard
some women claim, loading the dishwasher or sweeping the floor, then he's a
master of titillation.

He's
handsome, brilliant and successful. But he can also be scatterbrained,
antisocial and arrogant. He is a bad dancer, and he knows far too much about
Klingon politics and the lyrics to Yes songs. All in all, he's not that much
better than other men. The fault must be my own.

Her husband is what feminists wanted men to become. Perhaps
Waldman feels that she must love him for fulfilling an ideal. Perhaps she does
not respect him for as much. Who knows?

Now, as though we did not know about Waldman’s marriage and
private life, she has written a new memoir, one which reveals her to be a
basket of bad behaviors, a case study in applied psychiatry and an insufferable
human being. It makes her husband look like a saint. A little less honesty
would do us all very well.

Amy Anderson summarizes Waldman’s book in Acculturated. Thereby she saves us the trouble of having to
read it. We are grateful. If you thought that Waldman was merely a housewife
and mother reflecting about her condition, you would have been wrong.

Anderson writes:

Waldman’s
afflictions are numerous. They include, she says, Bipolar II, PMS, PMDD, PME,
insomnia, irritability, and a nasty case of frozen shoulder. She picks
horrendous fights with her husband, including when he buys her a couch as a
surprise gift—he wanted her to be comfortable in their shared workspace—without
consulting her first on the style. She yells at her kids and flips out at her
dry cleaner. She has a notorious temper tantrum on Twitter after her latest
novel fails to make the New York
Times list of notable books for 2014. “I’ve spent the morning on my
couch, sobbing about not being included in the NYT Notable Book List! I mean
What The FUCK? I know this book is good!” Her days are filled with rage and
despair.

Waldman
has been prescribed a dizzying array of medication for her volcanic moods, she
tells us: Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft, Cymbalta, Effexor, Effexor XR,
Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Topomax, Adderall, Adderall XR, Ritalin, Concerta,
Strattera, Xanax, Valium, Ativan, Seroquel, Ambien, and Lunesta. “I’m sure I’m
forgetting some,” she writes. “That can happen when you take a shit-ton of
drugs.” But the drugs that seem to have done the trick for Waldman and kept her
from destroying her life and marriage were not in the SSRI family but were
instead illegal and psychedelic: LSD, which she takes in micro-doses, and the
party drug MDMA, or Molly, as the club kids call it, which she and Chabon take
together when they feel the need to “recharge” their marriage.

Everyone is talking about the fact that Waldman is using low doses of LSD and
MDMA. As for the notion that her husband is lusting after her all the time, the
need for MDMA suggests that things are not always as she makes them appear.

Anyway, her case seems to belong in the annals of
psychiatry. If it doesn’t, then today’s psychiatrists are perhaps not quite as
competent as they are made out to be.

Anderson concludes by emphasizing the most salient point,
namely that Waldman consistently fails to take responsibility for her behavior.
She suffers from an apparent character flaw and she is trying to medicate it, thus
to numb herself to the moral consequences of her own bad behavior.

She is
a partisan of the very modern, materialist
my-chemistry-is-to-blame-for-my-bad-behavior worldview, at least when she’s not
taking aim at her upbringing, in which case “self-blame” is at the root of her
relationship woes. “The problem with self-blame,” she says, “is that it
launches a vicious cycle. It makes me despondent, and when I’m despondent, I
lash out at my husband. Which makes me feel worse.” Whether chemistry or
self-blame is at fault for Waldman’s rages, though, moral agency and personal
responsibility have little role. Waldman bears no blame for her actions; her
character isn’t the result of her choices, her decisions. So much easier to
drop acid and get out of the blame business altogether. This is an impoverished
understanding of what it means to be human.

Friday, January 27, 2017

Perhaps Donald Trump swore an oath to himself… that he was
not going to follow the example of George W. Bush and allow himself to be a
media punching bag. We will see whether his punch-back twice-as-hard strategy
works. For now Trump appears to be out-of-touch with the facts. A week into his
administration, he does not seem to have
developed messaging discipline… yet.

Or else, it may be that Trump is gaslighting the media,
baiting them with obvious falsehoods and provoking them to show themselves as
emotionally overwrought. They are beginning to sound like a braindead celebrity
yelling: The Nazis are coming! The Nazis are coming!

… Trump
likes it this way, because when the press is constantly attacking him over
trivialities, it strengthens his position and weakens the press. Trump’s
“outrageous” statements and tweets aren’t the product of impulsiveness, but
part of a carefully maintained strategy that the press is too impulsive to
resist.

And also:

So he’s
prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re
constantly taking the bait.

They’re
taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control
— but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and
demonstrate lack of self-control.

What should the press and the Trump opposition do? Reynolds
offers sound advice:

The
killer counter-move for the press isn’t to double down on anti-Trump messaging.
The counter-move is to bolster
its own trustworthiness by acting (and being) more neutral and
sober, and by being more
trustworthy. If the news media actually focused on reporting facts
accurately and straightforwardly, on leaving opinion to the pundits, and on
giving Trump a clearly fair shake, then Trump’s tactics wouldn’t work, and any
actual dirt they found on him would do actual damage. He’s betting on the press
being insufficiently mature and self-controlled to manage that. So far, his bet
is paying off.

As for press bias, yesterday the senior State Department
staff resigned en masse. The press declared that they were repudiating Donald
Trump. It also explained that these staff members were effectively running the
place, controlling the massive bureaucracy. They were leaving the incoming
secretary without anyone with management skill. This is a bit bizarre
considering that Rex Tillerson has considerably more management experience than
all of them combined.

Others do not see this as a rebuke to the Trump
administration. They believe that the officials were going to be fired anyway. Some have suggested that they were fired, but put out another story to save face. Besides, these officials did not have a very
good record of accomplishment.

The State
Department is undoubtedly chock full of those with dirty hands
from the Clinton email scandal and its attendant coverup.
They're lucky not to be indicted, assuming they won't be. And then
there's the Benghazi episode. The degree to which State and Mrs. Clinton
colluded with the White House on that one is not yet fully known, despite the
hours of testimony. Kennedy was involved in that too, as was Victoria
Nuland, who was also let go.

And
speaking of dirty hands, the State Department is way past mere
fingernail problems, but up to its elbows and neck in the shameful (and
still opaque) Iran nuclear deal that bypassed Congress, not to mention the
American people, to shovel boatloads of cash to the mullahs who are now busy
spending them on such humanitarian enterprises as
providing advanced munitions for Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas,
various homicidal Syrian thugs, and who knows what other crazed Islamist
terrorists who are about to drone a shopping mall near you.

Then again, they were diverse, and that must count for
something.

While the press is fighting its war against Trump, the new
president is making some interesting moves of his own. One does better to tamp
down one’s emotions and to examine the game that is being played. Better the
game than the drama.

Peggy Noonan writes this morning that Trump is working to
produce an important political realignment. Pay closer attention to the White
House meetings, Noonan says. Through them, Trump is identifying himself as a
jobs president, as a president who cares primarily about American jobs. It
might, as some have suggested, be a lot of PR. Surely, it looks more like
mercantilism than free trade. And, many of the jobs that were announced were
going to stay here anyway.

No matter. Trump is defining his presidency in terms of
economic opportunity, at the expense of identity politics and political
correctness. He has done so in a series of important White House meetings.

Noonan reports on a meeting with CEOs:

More
important than the [executive] orders were the White House meetings. One was a
breakfast with a dozen major CEOs. They looked happy as frolicking puppies in
the photo-op, and afterward talked about jobs. Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin said she was
“encouraged by the president’s commitment to reduce barriers to job creation.”
In a statement after the meeting, the glassmaker Corning, whose CEO attended,
announced plans to expand its U.S. manufacturing base significantly over the
next few years. Because I live in New York and work at the Journal, I see and
talk to American CEOs. I’ve never heard them bang on about a need to boost
American jobs and manufacturing, ever. They usually talk about targeted
microloans in India, and robots.

This meeting was less significant than the meeting that
Trump took with labor union leaders. Noonan explains:

More
important still—the most important moment of the first week—was the meeting
with union leaders. Mr. Trump gave them almost an hour and a half. “The
president treated us with respect, not only our organization but our members,”
said Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’
International Union of North America, by telephone. Liuna had not endorsed
Trump in the campaign, but Mr. O’Sullivan saw the meeting’s timing as an
expression of respect: “He’s inaugurated on Friday and we’re invited in Monday
to have a substantial conversation.” The entire Trump top staff was there,
including the vice president: “His whole team—we were very impressed.” They
talked infrastructure, trade and energy. “The whole meeting was about middle
class jobs, how do we create more?” Mr. O’Sullivan believes the Keystone
pipeline will eventually generate more than 40,000 jobs. Mr. O’Sullivan said he
hopes fixing “our crumbling transportation infrastructure” will be “the largest
jobs program in the country.”

Mark Lilla warned Democrats
about continuing to play the identity politics card. They do not seem to have
heeded his message. Now, Trump wants to bring back men's jobs and the environmental lobby
is attacking the Keystone and Dakota pipeline executive orders.

Note what Trump is doing. First, as Noonan notes, he is
picking the Democrats’ pocket by inviting one of its most important
constituencies into his big tent. He is showing them respect and courtesy,
something that they were not shown in the previous Democratic administration.
Second, Trump was creating tens of thousands of guy-jobs, jobs in construction
and manufacturing and industry. If the Democratic Party wants to be the Woman’s
Party, as it identified itself during the last campaign and over the weekend,
it might find out that it cannot hold the woman’s vote. As Hillary Clinton
discovered, many women do not vote the feminist party line. No one seems to pay it much attention, but a lot of women strongly disliked Hillary.

Noonan also explains that the press would do better to stop
attacking Trump and to try to understand what he is doing, and how much he appeals to the average voter:

It’s a
mistake for observers in Washington and New York to fixate on Mr. Trump’s daily
faux pas at the expense of the political meaning of what he’s doing. He’s
changing the face of the GOP. It is a mistake, too, to see Mr. Trump’s tweet on
how Chicago had better solve its problem with violent crime or he’ll “send in
the Feds,” as merely stupid—just a tweet that raises the question “What does
‘send in the Feds’ mean?” If you’re a parent in a tough Chicago neighborhood,
you’d be heartened to think the feds might help. You’d be happy the president
noticed. You’d say, “Go, Trump!”

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Roger Cohen thought long and hard before declaring Donald
Trump a fascist. It’s more than you can say about many other members of the
fourth estate.

Cohen did not want to indulge a cheap analogy between the rise
of European fascism after World War I and America’s current political scene. And
yet, the temptation was there and he could not resist it.

In Cohen’s words:

I have
tried to tread carefully with analogies between the Fascist ideologies of 1930s
Europe and Trump. American democracy is resilient. But the first days of the
Trump presidency — whose roots of course lie in far more than the American
military debacles since 9/11 — pushed me over the top. The president is playing
with fire.

Keep in mind, keep firmly in mind, that Donald Trump has
been president for exactly six days. Cohen is not attacking Trump’s record. He
is attacking Trump’s rhetoric. There is a difference. Getting emotionally
overwrought over a president’s rhetoric—some of which I find dubious—is not
befitting a man of Cohen’s intelligence.

But, Cohen is correct to say that American democracy is
resilient. Has Anglo-American civilization ever fallen victim to fascism? As it
happens, denizens of the political left are constantly denouncing the
Anglosphere for being fascistic. They fail to notice that fascism's cultural roots
lie elsewhere. Cohen should have noted that the armies of America and
Great Britain that defeated European fascism and Nazism. Thinkers who trash
British and American civilization in the name of Middle European idealism are
basically sore losers.

That being said, Cohen does light on a salient point. The
point is so salient that I made it a centerpiece of my book Saving Face. In that book I examined
what happens to a nation when it loses a war. I would add today a remark by Winston
Churchill, namely that when it comes to war it’s worse not to fight than to
fight honorably and lose.

Two decades ago I expounded at length about the cultural
fallout from Vietnam. Cohen examines the consequences of our less-than-successful wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He writes:

National
humiliation is long in gestation and violent in resolution….

Some 2.7
million American soldiers came home to a country that had been
shopping while they served in the Afghan and Iraqi wars, with 6,893 killed and more than 52,000 injured.
They returned to an increasingly dysfunctional and polarized polity; to the
financial disaster of 2008; to the mystery of what the spending of trillions of
dollars in those wars had achieved; to stagnant incomes; to the steady
diminishment of American uniqueness and the apparent erosion of its power.

Cohen must have been short on space. He fails to remark that the national humiliation America suffered after the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan was engineered by Barack Obama.

After all, Obama declared that the situation in Iraq was
stable and under control in 2011. Being the ultimate anti-war candidate, he
surrendered America’s victory and withdrew America’s forces from the country. You
know what happened next.

Obama ran around apologizing for America and bowing down to
the mullahs in Iran. He allowed the Iranian Navy to humiliate America’s sailors.
After that episode Obama’s Secretary of State thanked Iran for treating the
sailors so humanely.

In Iraq, Obama snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. As
for Afghanistan, America’s humiliation was on public display when Obama traded
five Taliban commanders for a deserter named Beau Bergdahl.

Given Obama’s display of weakness, we should not be
surprised that America turned to someone who at least sounded like he was tough
and uncompromising, someone who would never apologize.

Cohen has understood perfectly well that the debacle of Syria
was entirely the fault of Barack Obama. He should have added that another champion
of national humiliation is German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

As it happens Cohen has strongly supported the Merkel
policy. He believes in open borders for refugees, regardless of who they are and
what they contribute. In that he favors the Obama/Clinton approach, approach
that represents a failure of national will and a failure to protect the nation’s
citizens. Where we see the downtrodden of the earth seeking refuge, the
immigrants that Merkel invited into Germany do not consider themselves to be
refugees. They see themselves as an invading army enjoying the spoils of their
victory.

Faced with the weak Merkel, a woman who has allowed her
nation and its people to be humiliated systematically by an unassimilable flood
of immigrants, Great Britain voted to exit the European Union and America voted
to build a wall. Whether and how well the latter will work, we do not know. The
picture of an America that will no longer tolerate being invaded by people who
have no business being here is clear enough.

All of this to say, first that when talking about national humiliation
we need first to know who has brought this upon the nation. And second, that
there is not just one way to respond to it. Fascism is one way, but it is
certainly not the only way. After the Vietnam debacle, arguably a bigger
national humiliation than Iraq and Afghanistan, America did not turn to a strong man. It launched the
Great American Cultural Revolution.

If Cohen were as enamored of rational thought as he says he
is, he would have considered alternatives to his cheap analogy.

And he ought to have thought a bit more clearly before
dropping this at the end of his column:

Trump’s
outrageous claims have a purpose: to destroy rational thought.

Between you and me, when Trump’s opponents indulge in an
irrational display of raw feeling they are not promoting the cause of rational
thought. If you want to advance rational thought, practice what you preach. Consider
all sides of the argument, take all of the facts into account and make a
deliberate judgment.

Now that you mention it, how has the New York Times fostered
rational thought about the Trump phenomenon? Has it presented all sides of the
issue, kept its readers well informed and has it given them the facts they can use to make an independent judgment?

Cohen himself has no influence on Times reporting, and does
not raise the issue. Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote on the day after
the election that the news media—aka the Times-- had let its readers down by
keeping them in the dark about what was going on around the country. Statistical
models had not compensated for their living in a bubble.

Rutenberg wrote:

All the dazzling technology, the big data and
the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally
human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from
yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country.

The news media by and large missed what was
happening all around it, and it was the story of a lifetime. The numbers
weren’t just a poor guide for election night — they were an off-ramp away from
what was actually happening.

The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot
more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger
of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a
selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their
jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the
mainstream media.

Of course, it was more than boiling anger. More than
irrational emotion was on display in the election. After all, voting is a deliberative
action; it is not the same thing as breaking windows and burning up limos.

People voted for Trump because they had had enough of watching
the nation be systematically humiliated. The American people
did not want to make the same mistake again.

They might have overdone it. They might have chosen someone
who will not allow his office to enhance his stature. On the other hand, Trump
did not invent autocratic government, ruling by executive orders. He
is merely canceling the orders signed into law by his
predecessor… a man who believed that if the Congress did not do what he wanted
it to do, he would have to do it himself.

If you are looking for someone who ruled despotically, you
do not have to look very far. Perhaps Trump will be as much of a despot as Obama.
Perhaps not. But, we should base our judgment on something more than rhetoric.

We
all want to promote rational thought. And we recall that there was nothing
rational about the way so many of Obama’s supporters in the media have been
slobbering over him for eight years now. They never found fault with him and
refused to hold him accountable for anything that happened during his
administration.

That, in itself, will make people angry.

It is not just the media that has been trying to destroy
rational thought. America’s universities have pretty much killed it. They killed it with a flood of adolescent sentiment and with political
correctness.